Creating and testing your website on your local computer and your hosting server is only the first step in testing the functionality and appearance of your website. There are many factors that affect how your website works and looks to your visitors.

You can't study HTML or create web pages for long before you encounter the webmaster's worst enemy. I'm talking about cross-browser compatibility. There are several web browsers used to surf the Internet and your visitor might be using any one of them. When you create your site, you will want to write code that will work in most, if not all, of these popular browsers.

Next, your visitor might be using a different operating system than you are. Is he using WindowsR 98 or XP? Is he using a Mac? And the screen resolution on older computers is not as refined as the 1280 x 1024 resolution found on the newer computers.

These factors along with others such as which plug-ins the user has available all affect how your website might work and look from your visitor's perspective. The ideal would be to test your site against every possible combination of these factors. But unless you have one of each computer, operating system, and browser and so on, this is not an option.

BrowserCam.com is a website that can be a great help when testing your pages. BrowserCam offers two services; Screen Capture Service and Remote Access Service.

Screen Capture Service

This service will give you screen captures (pictures) of your website under any combination of the above factors. You use an online wizard to select the browser, operating system, screen resolution and so on for the test. Then type in the url of your test page(s) and you will get back the screen capture of your web page(s). This would be good for testing static web pages.

Remote Access Service

With this service you can test your dynamic web pages. BrowserCam has a long list of browsers, computers, and operating systems at their location and a way for you to use these machines remotely from the comfort of your own desktop to test your web pages. You log in to your account and "hook up" to any of their machines through your computer. Then you run your tests as if you where sitting right in front of their machines.

BrowerCam has four service plans; One Day Plan, Super Saver Plan, One Month Plan and the Annual Plan.